Gearing up for Summer

Spring is just around the corner – quickly followed by summer and here’s what aggravates me MOST about them both.

April showers may bring May’s flowers – but an early spring rain can be cold.

If it’s April 1st or later, I’ve turned off my furnace, so when it rains – it’s chilly outside and chillier inside. I don’t know whether to open the windows or start a fire – and I don’t have a fireplace.

Then there is the mud; water from the winter snow-melt, added with the rain, makes mud. Muddy paw tracks in the house and mud splatter on the outside of the house, garage, and car. I can’t hose off anything – more water makes more mud.

Yes – there are daffodils and other spring flowering bulbs – but they have no fragrance, or they stink, and only look good for a few days.

By the end of April, I’ll be planting tomato’s, which will either die on the vine or have so much fruit, I’ll be cutting them up to top off my corn flakes.

Mother’s Day in May, means my sons will flip for the bill when they take me out to breakfast. Although this year, I’m going to insist we find a restaurant that starts serving Mimosa’s at 11am.

By now everything’s in flower, it’s getting hotter day-by-day, the corn’s as tall as an elephant’s eye, and more and more women are dressing like sluts! (IMO !)

Belly’s, navel’s, and tattoo’s are now exposed in skirts so short, that when these women bend over, you can see what they had for breakfast.

And what fad or fashion is this showing-off the bra-strap thing – who let that in?

The straps don’t match the top, they flop every which way, and no one seems to be blinking an eye at it.

Finally, someone, (probably a persnickety Grandma like me), is selling a doohickey on TV that pulls the bra straps together, between the shoulder blades. Maybe I’ll start handing those out at the mall.

As an adolescent, I remember begging my Uncle Marty to roll up his shirt sleeve, so I could see the dancing hula girl he came home with from the Korean War. My mother, his sister, would cringe and roll her eyes. Yes, I know, probably just as I do now.

But these tat’s that are out now are big and bold things on the necks, wrists, ankles, and calves of young women, in places you can’t, or don’t want to cover up. (Yeah – yeah – sure – who cares?)

And the belly-button, nose, multi-ear, and mentolabial sulcus piercings – are grosser still. Can you get a job in a medical/dental office with these open, non-healing holes? (Yeah – yeah – sure – don’t care.)

Oh! the mud. I live in Oregon. And have a 50 pound dog. And, as a consequence to both, a mud pit instead of a lawn.
I was thinking with the downturn in the economy, white trash sporting events may hit their peak. I’m going to rake it in- Wrestling at Amy’s, Bring Your Own Bikini and Beer, $5 at the door.

I was born, raised, and lived my first 25 years in NYC - da’ Bronx. Over the next 25, I lived in 3 or 4 states, raised my family, and after a long marriage, suddenly became a divorced empty nester in the Heartland.

Having always had an opinion, (w/a New York attitude), and being vocal about it, and with a love of reading and writing, I had a weekend newspaper column in the Midwest, writing about life – its little annoyances and its joys - as seen through the perspective of both a New Yorker and a Midwesterner.

When the newspaper changed editors, I went out with the bathwater, so as a 2008 New Year’s resolution, I decided to blog and began in June 2008.